Friday, October 31, 2014

When confronted with these facts and "para-facts" from their own experiences, individuals often develop a significantly different "story" or worldview than the one that prevails in societies throughout the world. Even though many believe in an afterlife, their behavior does not reflect that. Once we understand that birth and death are transitions akin to awakening and sleeping, part of a continual development, each presenting important opportunities for growth and assistance of fellow beings who are not as separate or different as they may seem.

We are lead more and more to a life of continual positive self-improvement, including ethics, inner balance and self-mastery; a life of increasingly selflessness and wide-reaching service, with a "long view" of all aspects of life. Death, then, does not provoke fear, anymore than sleep. We need not seek immortality: we are already immortal. However, our biological corpus and the current circumstances remain ephemeral and can be seized for furthering maturity and well-being of self and others: ever more complex, ordered and in tune with the laws of the cosmos. We discover there is no heaven or hell, only choices to make and repercussions to learn from in consciential evolution.

Fear is easy to manipulate and people that are afraid can be targets for malicious manipulation and influence. Free of this mother-of-all-fears, we are able to make better and more rational decisions. Attempting and having access to out of body experiences and other psi abilities can set us on a journey of trying to understand this life. We have this glimpse into something considered unusual, a different world that most people are not aware of, we will come back with questions and a new perspective on life. We will be more curious and the insights obtained can enrich all areas of human activity.

In other dimensions, just like in ours, thoughts and intentions have consequence, they attract things and people. This is sometimes called the law of attraction, and in the astral dimensions we are able to see this much easier and in a more immediate fashion. Soon, we realize how vital it is to promote the quality of and monitor changes in our thoughts, intentions, ethics, emotions, mood, the state of our body and chi. As we become more aware of our influence on others and ethical principles, we become more virtuous. We can become less an less vulnerable to undue external influence, as well, advancing toward a total, permanent imperturbability (intrusionlessness).

So, while not feared, death remains a sort of looming deadline, providing some positive incentive to examine the current opportunities this type of existence provides. It also invites us to think about what kind of intermissive period (between physical lives) and next physical life we might like to have and what we can do in this life before we reach that "finish line," perhaps with tremendous satisfaction for the inner growth, relationship, intellectual and altruistic achievements and challenges overcome, for the artifacts or systems of knowledge and assistance left behind, and the depth and number of lives touched in and out-of-body.

Such a worldview may take a long time to become widespread. However, more daring and lucid individuals can develop a more multidimensional self-awareness, which can turn them into the life-affirming, visionary, ethical, universalistic, courageous leaders we need today to overcome the crises underpinned by the outdated paradigms. Awakening to psi abilities is only the beginning. How might you apply your multi-level awareness? Which issues could you tackle? which area of knowledge will you advance? Have you planned something before you were even born? Your existential program can be as unique as you are. Here's to getting started, discovering it or taking it to the next level. Enjoy the challenge of Multidimensional Life and its gift of choice, of love, of beauty, of surprise, of challenge, of strangeness, of awe.

The Overview Effect is a related phenomenon that features a similar paradigm shift. Several astronauts describe their awe-inspiring, transformative exoplanetary experiences. As orbital tourism nears commercial feasibility, we can look forward to more and more people seeing the Earth as it is: a glistening blue, living space ship with a thin protective layer, without borders, but with more and more visible scars. It is no wonder that, as science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson often posits, the ecological and humanitarian movements (and interest in science and engineering) got a huge boost after the first images of Earth from outer space entered the global consciousness, collective unconscious, planetary holothosene, zeitgeist, morphic field, or information field.

The impact afforded by lucid projections of the consciousness or out-of-body experiences is at least as impactful. It is similar in the way that we see our "home" from the outside and have the chance to reconsider it. It also broadens our sense of universalism and triggers serious questioning of reality and our place in it. Both experiences bridge theory and visceral experience, as beautifully described in the aforementioned film. In other words, unlike the outdated view of the OBE as a dissociative or even narcissistic experience, it is quite the opposite. Both the "out of body" and "out of planet" experiences are profoundly integrative, expanding our sense of oneness with fellow beings, with the very fabric of multidimensional Reality.

The difference is that we tend to identify too much with this individual body and not enough with our life-sustaining planet. The projection shows us that while the fragile, mortal, breathing, walking, sleeping, hungry, hormonal, instinctual body is a precious vessel for us to evolve in this realm, it is certainly not the totality of who or what we are. In fact, we realize that we are much more vast and eternal than this useful scaffolding-meat suit: we are at least as cosmic as the physical cosmos that surrounds our Earth.

The emerging life-affirming, consciousness-centric paradigm sees consciousness as central to Reality. Consciousness, here, is used in its broadest sense, as a technical synonym for our essence, intelligence principle, Self, soul, or the bios in biology – the driving force of living beings itself; that which we are beyond the manifestations or vehicles of the consciousness like genetics, the brain, the body as a whole, or even the so-called chi, astral and mental/causal bodies that have been discussed for thousands of years: pre-historic shamans of animistic cultures, Vedic philosophers of ancient India, Judean mystics, Egyptian clerics, early Buddhist monks, all the way to contemporary leading-edge scientists starting in the 18th century with the likes of Emmanuel Swedenborg.

Based on more than speculation, this multidimensional and multiexistential view arises from actual experiences like the projection of the consciousness (astral projection), near-death experience, past life recall, clairvoyance, telepathy and mediumship which reveal that the consciousness is not limited to the material reality and that we oscillate between "physical" and "extraphysical" states: lives in a body (intraphysical period) and without one (extraphysical period or intermissive period).

For the majority of human history, we have considered the human spirit, soul, self, or mind a self-evident and fundamental part of Reality. The material realm was often regarded as less of a reality than consciousness, or at best an extension or reflection of it. With the progress of empirical science, however, a conflict developed between those those who dared question orthodox doctrines and the religious power that defended such dogma. A relative truce was achieved by establishing mutually-exclusive magisteria: the material realm could be investigated by the scientific spirit and matters of the spirit were to be left to the clergy.

Religious authority's censorship and abuse of power led scientists away from studying the nature of our internal reality, limiting to phenomena that can be physically posited, until subjective reality was all but rejected in a new kind of bias and censorship: an epistemological fundamentalism often referred to as scientism. Consciousness was increasingly considered an illusion, an imaginary ghost in the biological billiard ball machine, an epiphenomenon of the brain.

It is worth pointing out that many of the pioneers of quantum physics (as well as the likes of Newton, Descartes, Einstein) did not limit their world view to the observable physical world and were curious about the subjective realm. While great technological progress has been achieved through Newtonian-Cartesian material science, it's usefulness has deteriorated with the rise of quantum physics a century ago.

After a reductionist detour of about two centuries, the idea that consciousness is real, fundamental, and irreducible is resurgent. However, this time consciousness is returning to the center as a result of the application of the scientific spirit, including parapsychology and contemporary consciousness science, rather than religious thought. The current planetary crisis is further demonstrative of the inadequacy of the materialistic worldview as a paradigm upon which to build civilizations. Not only is the ailing materialistic paradigm challenged by the physics and consciousness research of the last century, materialism lacks internal, logical consistency as elucidated by idealism philosophers like Bernardo Kastrup. We can also look to remarks by speculative realism philosophers like Graham Harman on the folly of reductionist scientism:

"[T]here’s a more insidious form of human-centric ontology, as found in many version of scientism. On the one hand, scientism insists that human consciousness is nothing special, and should be naturalized just like everything else. On the other hand, it also wants to preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world. Another of putting it… for all their gloating over the fact that people are pieces of matter just like everything else, they also want to claim that the very status of that utterance is somehow special. For them, raindrops know nothing and lizards know very little, and some humans are more knowledgeable than others. This is only possible because thought is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience, which inanimate matter is never allowed to do in such theories, of course. In short, for all its noir claims that the human doesn’t exist, it elevates the structure of human thought to the ontological pinnacle."

The curriculum of educational activities and the research programs at International Academy of Consciousness are based on a paradigm that recognizes consciousness as more than an ephemeral result of biological evolution, which is itself widely considered to be an accidental outcome of matter-energy. The Consciential Paradigm gives central stage to consciousness - after all, all we observe and experience is through and in consciousness. It does not dismiss the material reality and the biological systems. Rather, it contextualizes it in a more holistic, integrative, multi-level "outer" cosmos that extends from physical reality into other subtle aspects of reality experienced through chi, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, cosmic consciousness and more. The "outer" appears more and more like an extension of the "inner," each giving meaning to the other. Without the observing, participating consciousness, "outer" reality loses any meaning as reality outside of observation is not something we can ascertain. Without the "inner" reality, our microcosm and our shared experiences, a reductionist, mechanistic account of reality is clearly limited.

Though stubbornly holding on, reductionist materialism has been in decline for over a century. However, why is the pathological, destructive mono-materialist paradigm so persistent? Our senses give us a false sense of solidity of matter and hide the fact that it is only the tip of the iceberg of a spectrum of consciousness realities. However, as a result of transpersonal experiences, we become more perceptive and able to able to transcend the usual limits of human awareness, ethics and maturity.

We can step out of our physical and solid world and look out through another lens. By doing so, we can see ourselves and our lives from a different perspective and when we come back, our worldview is shifted and changed. As worldviews change, so do all disciplines and aspects of civilization, from art and architecture and to ethics and economics. The ramifications touch and inform all of our problems on earth. Many of the world’s problems come from the human-centered perspective that nature and life are things; they are to be used and then thrown away. When we see ourselves as consciousness that exists outside the physical body, this continuity and connection between ourselves, our bodies, spirits, and all living things becomes apparent.

With this knowledge, life, the environment, and most other things in life become more valuable and precious. Through extraordinary human experiences and related scientific evidence, we can see ourselves as a multi-dimensional consciousness in the process of evolution along with other beings. With this realization, we become more connected in a cosmic way to our fellow human beings and the priority becomes the well-being and development of individuals, communities, and the human family as a whole: human knowledge, abilities, intelligences, ethics, maturity, character, cooperation, and integral health.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

The International Academy of Consciousness (IAC) continues its educational outreach in Scandinavia, building new bridges, this time Norway's Wisdom of North program, which interviewed Demystifying the Out-of-Body Experience author and IAC president Luis Minero. IAC has done in-person activities in Helsinki and Stockholm in the past, as well as serving students from Scandinavia via online courses and those that have traveled to our IAC Campus in Portugal and other European centers such as IAC UK and IAC Germany. For a list of IAC locations and upcoming online courses, please visit our website, or let us know if you have a group and wish us to visit a new place. IAC has been to over 50 cities worldwide and we attend new locations every year.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Southampton University scientists led by Dr Sam Parnia have found more evidence that awareness can continue minutes after clinical death. Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied in 15 hospitals in the US, UK and Australia, 330 survived and 140 said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated. 13 per cent said they had felt separated from their bodies and the same number said their sensed had been heightened. The results were published in the journal Resuscitation.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Larry Dossey, Mario Beauregard, Gary Schwartz, Lisa Miller, Marilyn Schlitz, Rupert Sheldrake are among the co-authors of "Manifesto for a Post-Materialistic Science" published in the journal Explore and lauded in HuffPost. We highly recommend you read the two-page essay written by highly qualified scholars, scientists, and physicians who do not subscribe to the notion that all of reality can be reduced to materialistic laws of nature that ignore the inner world of consciousness, for instance. The HuffPost commentary will provide some insightful historical context as well. A similar "manifesto" was signed by 100 academics from around the world and published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in January.

The curriculum of educational activities and the research programs at International Academy of Consciousness are based on a paradigm that recognizes consciousness as more than an ephemeral result of biological evolution, which is itself widely considered to be an accidental outcome of matter-energy. The Consciential Paradigm gives central stage to consciousness - after all, all we observe and experience is through and in consciousness. It does not dismiss the material reality and the biological systems. Rather, it contextualizes it in a more holistic, integrative, multi-level "outer" cosmos that extends from physical reality into other subtle aspects of reality experienced through chi, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, cosmic consciousness and more. The "outer" appears more an more like an extension of the "inner," each giving meaning to the other.

Without the observing, participating consciousness, "outer" reality loses any meaning as reality outside of observation is not something we can ascertain. Without the "inner" reality, our microcosm and our shared experiences, a reductionist, mechanistic account of reality is clearly limited: and while great technological progress has been achieved through it, it's usefulness has deteriorated with the rise of quantum physics a century ago. The current planetary crisis is further demonstrative of the inadequacy of the materialistic worldview as a paradigm upon which to build civilizations.

We leave you with an invitation to attend a meeting poised to shape the future of post-materialistic science: the 1st International Congress of Conscientiology (Consciousness Science) to be held at the IAC Campus in Portugal in May. Join luminaries of post-materialistic consciousness science such as Thomas Campbell (out-of-body experiencer and author My Big T.o.E. - Theory of Everything), Brenda Dunne, former manager of the historic Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory (co-author of classics like Margins of Reality), and quantum physicist and and consciousness scholar-experiencer Massimiliano Sassolli de Bianchi (author of numerous insightful papers and the book Observer Effect: The Quantum Mystery Demystified). The physicist suggests that reductionism may be outdated as even physics may be pointing to a "multi-material" physical world. Perhaps, non-reductionist science is a more accurate expression, in this case. In any case, the conference will count with the representatives from multiple organizations and viewpoints, including the presence of researchers identified with the prevailing or more conventional paradigm as well, such as internationally-renowned neuroscientist Olaf Blanke.

"The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule."- Teilhard de Chardin